D’Souza Hunts for Obama’s Radical Roots in Kenya: Review

Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A.,
Dinesh D’Souza concedes in his documentary “2016: Obama’s
America.”

That’s as close to moderation as this nutty film gets.

A surprise box-office hit, the $2.5 million “2016” has
sold $9 million of tickets since expanding nationwide from its
July 13 debut at a lone Texas theater.

Fueled by talk-radio support (notably from Rush Limbaugh)
and group pre-sales, the anti-Obama screed is now playing across
the country and took the eighth spot on last weekend’s box-
office roster, sandwiched between “Premium Rush” and “Hope
Springs.”

The choir being preached to apparently isn’t lining up for
cinematic polish or storytelling finesse.

D’Souza, an ultra-right-wing pundit and author of “The
Roots of Obama’s Rage,” co-directs with producer John Sullivan.
Their filmmaking inexperience announces itself with every badly
performed “re-enactment.” (Another “2016” producer, Gerald
R. Molen, has production credits that include “Minority
Report” and “Schindler’s List.”)

Driving Theory

In short (and very little in this talky, 90-minute lecture
feels short), the driving theory of “2016” is that Obama can
be understood only within what D’Souza calls an “anti-colonial
framework.”

Specifically, the leftist, anti-Western anti-colonialism of
Barack Obama Sr., the Kenyan father young Barry saw only once
after the future president was 2 years old -- when he was all of
10.

D’Souza supports his thesis with cherry-picked facts and
pseudo-scholarly leaps of logic.

A psychology professor says that “many young men have this
experience of disappointment with a father,” offered here as
some sort of Rosebud to explain Obama’s insatiable desire to
render the United States a weakened, nuke-free bastion of Third
World collectivism.

The national debt, which D’Souza loads squarely on Obama’s
shoulders as if George W. Bush never happened, is “a weapon of
mass destruction.”

In a butter-wouldn’t-melt voice and near-constant
expression of dour concern, D’Souza resurrects many a right-wing
bugaboo, from Obama’s “weirdly sympathetic” feelings for
Guantanamo detainees, to control of the Falkland Islands.

Brother’s Keeper

He makes much of the impoverished living conditions of
Obama’s Kenyan half-brother George Obama (“Is he not your
keeper?” D’Souza asks), and uses Invading Hun map graphics to
demonstrate how the Middle East could morph into the “United
States of Islam.”

With names like that, “2016” seems more 2008, though
nothing screams bad timing as loud as D’Souza’s peculiar
obsession with NASA.

The former “symbol of greatness,” D’Souza claims, has
been reduced by Obama into something “more modest,” a sort of
high-shuttling Greyhound bus line.

D’Souza clearly didn’t see Mars coming. Along with historic
photos and international good will, NASA’s Curiosity rover can
now claim the deflation of a self-regarded Nostradamus among its
accomplishments.

“2016: Obama’s America,” from Rocky Mountain Pictures, is
playing across the country. Rating: *